> You have smaller family sizes; people retreat inside because now they have air conditioning and TV and they’re not out in the front yard socializing as much. So, for a lot of reasons, we begin to lose trust in each other.
I think that a bigger factor is the car-centric city and suburb design that started in the US after World War II. It was intended to give everyone what they wanted; a big house, a yard, consistency, etc., but it prevents anyone without a driver or a car & license from socializing and visiting a "third place." I think that it increased individual isolation even before the internet or social media existed and thus set the foundation for social media to be as big of an influence as it is.
+1 and also want to mention that kids under 16 – what Haidt talks about – can't drive a car at all. Riding a bike is more cumbersome and unsafer than necessary.
As a German, the typical US city and its suburbs really represent a kid-hating hellscape.
While I agree with much of the article - the leap from "social media is making tween girls suicidal" to "adults should not be able to determine what information they choose to consume because then they might vote wrong" is a huge one.
If there was a way to mark people who are shills as shills, and bots and bots, the situation would be much more manageable. The fact is that there is intense hybrid war fought on peoples hearts and minds on every possible informational channel.
Do "social media", i.e., so-called "tech" companies, allow adults to determine what information they choose to consume. Pretty sure that no one using Facebook ever requested a "feed", the contents of which are determined by Facebook. The original Facebook did not have a "feed" and people using Facebook were upset when Facebook added one.
[There is something strange about using both the words "determine" and "choose" instead of just one.]
The 2015+ timeline definitely tracks with my wife's anecdotal experience. She's been working in pediatrics (exclusively at Children's Hospitals) since 2003 and the amount of kids she sees with self harm or suicide attempts has grown so much in the recent years.
I gave private math lessons for more than two decades.
I can't speak about self harm, but them kids got in couple of years around a decade ago insanely unable to focus. They were consistently distracted.
Adults who use lots of internet in general (regardless of socials) are the same. Applies to my girlfriend (she changed a lot since she started working behind a computer) and I have to admit to myself (which is why I block most of the internet during working hours).
It's insane how your brain gets rewired by doomscrolling into essentially dopamine seeking.
Sadly internet is an inseparable part of modern IT slave.
Sometimes I wish there is a special prison that admits people who wants to achieve something but are too distracted to do so. It doesn't have Internet, nor does it have smart devices. It doesn't allow them out until they achieve the objectives. I'd be happy to buy its service.
This is purely anecdotal, but looking at my experiences in late-primary to middle school from 2008-2012 so, the exposure to the internet from early on can be pretty bad.
8 year olds swearing left and right, talking about porn and pedos or making all sorts of unpleasant statements that you seen on 4chan can have a pretty debilitating effect on a child's development, especially before puberty has even begun. A kind of "innocence lost", a cruel and cynical culture that can envelope those who weren't exposed to it early on. Metasize that 10 years later and in 2015 or so we see the side effects of it. Now of course that might be just my school then, but it's still something I would consider today. There are certain heuristics regarding the changes in mass appeal of certain genres that I would correlate to deep, fundamental cynicism in the mainstream zeitgeist.
Same. I learned it from the older kids who I assume heard it from their parents - the really noxious racism and sexism you wouldn’t even get in R movies. We still knew it.
Mainstream people oriented social media is indeed really bad. But is it the technology or the incentives governing it? In other words, is instagram bad because of pictures, or because of engagement-optimized recommendations and endless feeds? What even is the difference between the medium and the message in a world of hyper-personalization?
When social media came we did as we always do; we talk about the potential of the emerging technology. Connecting people across the world, learning, sharing experiences. I don’t think we were wrong in the assessment, but I do think many of us were missing that potential is not the governing force - it’s the incentives.
Now, people are doing the exact same thing with gen AI: talking about the potential. But what’s the business model? Will our kids get excellent private tutors with endless knowledge, or a barrage of post-truth content designed to market, sell, influence, nudge and confuse?
My opinion is that it’s just partisan gerrymandering creating safe districts is pushing our politics towards the extremes as both parties run far left and far right candidates in their safe district primary. It gives us candidates out of touch with the overall electorate and unable to compromise.
Create safe districts, moving the real election to the primary stage, and then give the electorate a doomscrolling-device as their primary information source.
So the primary voters become more radical and paranoid and we wind up with growing proportion of fringe candidates who would lose to a dog if only they weren't safe seats.
Partisan gerrymandering doesn’t affect senate or presidential elections (with the small exception of Nebraska and Maine’s electors) yet those elections have also become more partisan and polarized.
Moreover, the growing rural/urban partisan polarization means even non gerrymandered districts that are created by nonpartisan panels or algorithms are frequently left or right polarized. Creating competitive districts would require gerrymandering in many places in the USA.
You say that like US states didn't have boundaries cut or decisions on when states were admitted to affect elections. For example:
Missouri Compromise,
Kansas Nebraska Act,
Nevada, Utah, and the Dakotas' existence,
Washington DC not having representation,
Puerto Rico languishing
Coincidentally it seems like the rural United States has disproportionate representation and power. I'm sure that has nothing to do with the Republican party not winning popular votes in presidential elections for all but one election in over 30 years
State boundaries date to 70 years old or more. The original “gerrymandering” of those boundaries is incredibly out of date. DC was given electoral votes most recently in 1961 with the expectation that it would be a “swing state” evenly split between parties, for instance.
Many solid “red” rural states today frequently elected statewide democrats just a few decades ago.
Partisan gerrymandering means you can push more heavily partisan messaging, pushing the overall constituency further out and making the more extreme candidate electable.
Biden was the most centrist of the Democratic candidates, and is considered center right by many. It's hard to argue that presidential elections have become more partisan and polarized.
Biden is viewed unfavorably by a majority of Americans (as is Trump). As recently as 2008 both major party presidential candidates had net favorable ratings from the country.[0]
That’s not even getting into that the claim of Biden as “center right” is based on Overton window shifting. Biden repudiated many of his earlier more centrist positions on DEI (e.g. his anti-school busing activism in the 70s), immigration, abortion, etc to win the nomination. Compare Biden’s platform and positions to the Obama 2008 campaign platform and can you really see it as a “rightward” shift?
i really value this point, although the fact that biden is president and not elizabeth warren or bernie sanders shows that centrism is a lot more present in the presidency. thanks for your well reasoned comment.
As for the assertions about "governability," that seems to be more about the government reaching consensus. I think PACs play a bigger role there than social media, but I try to follow the money.
I agree. There have long been concerns about the impact of various media on children, as highlighted by figures like Jerry Mander, Neil Postman, and even Ron Serling.
The issue lies not only in the quality of the content but also in the mediums through which they are consumed.
Today, we are surrounded by low-quality content that can be quickly and easily accessed. Those familiar with ADHD(and struggle with it) understand that the instant gratification from these videos can lead to a craving for more.
As a millennial who grew up with unrestricted access to the internet and the advent of smartphones, I truly believe the situation will continue to worsen rather than improve.
I even wrote an entire book on this topic, detailing how internet addiction has profoundly impacted my life.
Very American to believe that small communities can solve this problem and to not even expect parliament to do anything.
Parliament not doing anything is obviously a self-fulfilling prophecy, and small, local solutions to a tragedy of the commons.. I don't believe it'll work.
As someone who's not neurotypical and grew up in the 1990s I don't think we really did much for mental illness or have much of understanding of it until the past 15 or so years. Growing up the school system regarded people are disabled, learning disabled, lazy, normal, or gifted. There was no one checking kids out for social-anxiety, bipolar disorder, depression, etc. unless there was an extremely serious problem with their behavior.
Within the past 40 years they used to lock people like me up, give us lobotomies, forcibly medicate us, etc. Its easy to forget how society used to treat folks with mental illness. Its frankly no wonder that people to this day still hide it. Heck, I've had to contact the EEOC more than once. But the thing is, social-media didn't cause this, video games didn't cause this. I've always been genetically predisposed to this. In my opinion, unfettered access to the Internet in general is probably the worst environment for people with predispositions, but to simply blame everything on the environment we've create online through video games or social-media is wrong if not irresponsible.
I think your lobotomy timeline is off? As I understand the history, lobotomies became less common in the 1950s, once antipsychotics and antidepressants were available, and by the 1970s were rarely used. By 1984 it would not have been part of standard practice in the US.
"Not neurotypical" is a very wide category, and the vast majority of such were neither locked up nor given lobotomies.
On the other hand, ADHD kids in the 1990s were indeed forcibly medicated, as in, some schools coerced parents to give Ritalin to their child in order to attend school. IDEA 2004 included the 'Prohibition on Mandatory Medication' to prevent schools from doing that: https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/34/300.174 .
The interviewer's statement in questions makes me think they have a hobbyhorse to ride.
The possibility of arriving at a governing consensus through negotiation and compromise is being shattered by a cacophony of niche propagandists egging on their own siloed tribe of the faithful to engage in an endless partisan battle.
Looking at different generations (parents boomers vs millennials like myself) while there may be some group similarities, it seems to be like addiction or drugs, where humans take to social media on a spectrum from those who avoid it to those who make it their lives and the average people who use it as a tool sometimes
To be fair, both parents are expected to work while wages have not kept up. Work demands more than ever from you with less upside than ever before. My point is that parents are stretched thin.
They or their. It's a little awkward when you're referring to a specific person but becoming less so over time. However, you're referring to a generic person so "they" or "their" would be appropriate even without today's political correctness.
It may be an unpopular opinion, but I suspect treating juveniles with kid gloves all the time and the popularization of the view that they are entitled not be exposed to anything that may upset or offend them has lead to less personal resilience.
The social media environment does also mean that when subjected to bullying it is amplified by a massive factor that previous generations were not exposed to, so the change in expectations is certainly not the only factor at play here.
Yeah I think this is definitely a part of it. The average kid living in NYC a century or two ago was exposed to many more repulsive things on a daily basis than anything social media can come up with today. What's changed is that the expectation of "dealing with it" has evaporated.
Definitely used to be more common, but it wasn’t as if everyone was one of those things. My point was more that people were a bit tougher then, as they had more difficult everyday lives.
> The average kid living in NYC a century or two ago was exposed to many more repulsive things on a daily basis than anything social media can come up with today.
I don’t even need a citation here, I’m just curious what you’re imaging when you say this.
The amount of filth, trash, disease, and other unpleasant things used to be pretty crazy in NYC (and in other places like London or Paris, for that matter.)
Are you familiar with how squalid the conditions were for many people in the early 20th century? It was a whole lot worse than "trash in the street." More like, animals rotting in the street, ten people living in a studio apartment with no windows or fresh air, diseases widespread, people working 15 hour days in brutal conditions, etc.
Again, the usual scarecrow of "internet is corrupting our kids and our minds"...
The good excuse to push for population censorship and control.
The truth is that the problem is coming from the social society that we prefer to ignore: education collapsing, government and political world having arms wide open to dictatorship when it benefits to them,...
Just to remember that a few decades ago, same kind of persons were stating that books and free press are responsible for all of the moral corruption of the society...
> Just to remember that a few decades ago, same kind of persons were stating that books and free press are responsible for all of the moral corruption of the society
Sure, and those are not “the same kind of people” with the same motives nor rationale nor basis in knowledge as the people advocating for constraints around social media in the present day.
There are religious bookbanners today and they have very little overlap with the anti-social media crowd.
> There are religious bookbanners today and they have very little overlap with the anti-social media crowd.
I guess we're going to have to agree to disagree on that. To me it doesn't matter whether there's any actual overlap between the groups. It's the censorious impulse they share. Believing that they have the right to make this type of decision for others is what makes them the "same kind of people".
I did nothing of the sort. You're trying to set up a classic slippery slope fallacy and I'm not going to play that game.
Me: I think alcohol prohibitionists are meddling busybodies.
You: Oh, well, I guess you think there's nothing wrong with injecting babies with pure grain alcohol starting at birth.
Me: I think furnaces and central heating are wonderful inventions.
You: Oh, well, I guess you think it's okay to go around setting houses on fire.
That's how the game is played. I stopped being impressed by it decades ago. Likely before you were even born.
Well the education system certainly needs attention and a refactoring. I don't think anyone can dispute that. The details of what the end goal looks like vary wildly based on who you talk to.
I'm not sure what you mean by that. The article you linked says they plan to remove federal involvement in education, delegating that responsibility back to the states. From my perhaps naive viewpoint, decentralizing government education seems like it would allow more competing ideas and approaches into classrooms. It's not clear to me why this approach would dismantle education.
Why do you think this approach would dismantle education?
Because we’ve done it before and it yielded segregation, embedding of (one) religion in schools, and gigantic gaps in educational attainment based on where a child happened to be born.
Is it that hard to foresee what’ll happen if Louisiana et al started teaching children that the earth is 6000 years old, evolution is a farce, the US is a Christian nation, and also don’t worry about learning much outside of our immediate local (failing) economy?
It would be interesting to see if much of that has changed since the DoE was created in 1980. Do schools in Louisiana currently not teach that the earth is 6,000 years old, that evolution is a farce, and that the US is a Christian nation? Do we no longer have gigantic gaps in educational attainment based on where a child happened to be born? Segregation is federally illegal, so the proposed decentralization would only apply to curriculum and funding. I have no idea how the centralization of the education system has positively or negatively affected education outcomes, so I don't find the outcome of decentralizing it again obvious.
By the way, it's sad that this needs to be written, but I'm commenting in good faith. Without any kids in the education system, and without having been through the education system in many years, I'm not up to date with the latest statistics. All I have to go on is the occasional anecdotes from the people around me, which seem to be largely negative, but which could also be based in fantasy. I recognize that I have these blind spots, which is why I'm asking these questions.
I would be extremely careful to dismiss this out of hand. The group includes a large number of people from the Trump administration team, and the main purpose of the plan is to reform the government through loopholes/grey area means to consolidate power in the executive branch - thereby allowing rapid and sweeping changes throughout the government as a whole. Trump would love that, and has sung the praises of dictators and openly said he plans to be a dictator "on day one".
The system isn't designed to handle anything like that, and a ton of damage could be done by a concentrated effort from a group that intentionally refuses to play by the rules/norms.
The demarcation line here is 2012 though, and I wouldn't say material wise things made a sudden shift between 2008 and 2015. Arguably things were worse back then with the GFC while this decade has seen incredible returns for investors.
I agree. The world as we knew it ended with 9/11 and the new one has been made progressively worse ever since; mostly because "the war on X" is currently a thing and requires you to give away some of your rights.
I'm pretty skeptical of the idea that [recent technology] is to blame here, and not decades or centuries-long societal patterns. Especially when that technology is shaking up established "authorities" and calling their so-called expertise into question.
The fact that this seems particularly strong in Anglo and historically Protestant places and less in other developed countries suggests to me that this is more of a specific cultural phenomenon and less of a problem directly attributable to social media. But of course that's a much more complex topic and not something that you can wrap a trendy new nonfiction book around.
Social media is not like those earlier innovations. I think the best metaphor here is to imagine a public square in which people talk to each other. They debate ideas or put forth ideas that may not always be brilliant. They may not always be civil, but people can speak while others listen. Sometimes people are moved by persuasion or dissuasion. I think the Founding Fathers assumed that’s about the best we can hope for. Imagine one day, and I’ll call it 2009, that all changes. There’s no more public square. Everything takes place in the center of the Roman Colosseum. The stands are full of people who are there to see blood. That’s what they came for. They don’t want to see the lion and the Christian making nice; they want the one to kill the other. That’s what Twitter is often like.
The public square was emphatically not what media was like before social media. It was a locked-down space controlled by large corporations: newspapers, TV stations, and other institutions that told you what was acceptable to talk about and what wasn't. It wasn't a public square with equal access for all.
The Internet, just like the printing press in the 1500s-1600s, took that ability and spread it to millions of people that previously didn't have it. The results of the Gutenberg printing press were both good and bad, depending on your persuasion, but these types of "we need more restrictions on Internet publishing because old authorities are losing power" really sound like something that was said about the Gutenberg press when it started to spread information that called authority into question. It didn't work then, and it won't work now.
I think that a bigger factor is the car-centric city and suburb design that started in the US after World War II. It was intended to give everyone what they wanted; a big house, a yard, consistency, etc., but it prevents anyone without a driver or a car & license from socializing and visiting a "third place." I think that it increased individual isolation even before the internet or social media existed and thus set the foundation for social media to be as big of an influence as it is.